Comment author: Lumifer 16 July 2015 06:25:47PM 2 points [-]

When I say, "that object is red", I mean it as shorthand for "that object has a reflectance, transmittance, and emittance profile that usually leads humans to experience a red color sensation when viewing the object in neutral-ish conditions".

You could mean that.

Or you could mean it as shorthand for "that object emits or reflects electromagnetic radiation with a pronounced peak around 700nm wavelength".

Comment author: isionous 17 July 2015 04:31:26AM 0 points [-]

Neat, I recognize your username. I always liked your choice of username, and I've often enjoyed your comments. Thanks.

you could mean it as shorthand for "that object emits or reflects electromagnetic radiation with a pronounced peak around 700nm wavelength".

Except that is not sufficient nor necessary to ensure that the object would typically generate a red color sensation in humans, even in "neutral or typical conditions". So, I would not mean it as shorthand for that. Color sensations can not be boiled down to or predicted by spectral power distributions and reflectance profiles only.

I'm thinking your comment perhaps was a gentle nudge to say, "it's not too hard to make color an objective creature". Well, you can come up with some objective definition of whether some object has the property of redness, but you'd have to basically reimplement the human visual system and assume a huge amount about the object's current surroundings (or you could not go to that effort and end up with something that does a very poor job of corresponding to human color sensations). It would be similar to converting bitterness of food or soothingness of music into objective properties. Or maybe your comment was a gentle nudge in a completely different direction.

Comment author: isionous 16 July 2015 06:15:26PM *  0 points [-]

I'm going to raise an issue, and it could be fair to consider it a nitpick, but considering that you're trying to be rigorous, perhaps it is okay to be unusually technical.

Blue and green are not natural categories, or at least they are as natural as "sour tasting" or "stinky". To quote Bruce MacEvoy, "color is a complex judgment experienced as a sensation"; color is not an objective property of things in the world. When a human gazes at something, the color sensation they experience is highly dependent on all sorts of visual factors in the scene, and even depends on the memory and expectation of the human.

When I say, "that object is red", I mean it as shorthand for "that object has a reflectance, transmittance, and emittance profile that usually leads humans to experience a red color sensation when viewing the object in neutral-ish conditions". And let it be known that "red color sensation" and "neutral-ish conditions" are still massive shorthand. So really, "that object is red" is a statement concerning 1) the object 2) the human visual system 3) qualia 4) common viewing environments for humans.

I point this out because it seems wrong to try to do a bunch of rigorous thinking founded upon an extremely flawed example (flawed in the example is supposed to be about objective things, but is actually about subjective things). We even have Eliezer Yudkowsky talking about the nature of truth and using statements like "snow is white if and only if snow is white". It might sound like he's talking about facts, but imagine the analogous sentence "skunks are stinky if and only if skunks are stinky" or "chess is interesting if and only if chess is interesting". Now it is more clear the statement is about subjective experiences and actually fails to have a definite truth value.

Would you be comfortable if your natural category example was whether some music was soothing, or whether some object was bitter? If you would not be comfortable with using those subjective examples, you should not be comfortable using color as an example. If you are comfortable with those examples, you can disregard the issue I raise.

I think a lot of your points still stand, but you're taking unnecessary risks by using a flawed example.

Comment author: isionous 27 October 2014 05:45:16PM 29 points [-]

Took the survey. I loved the calibration questions; it takes ~20 times more effort to come up with the confidence level than the answer, and I always feel I learn about myself. I've messed with some calibration question games before and was downright astonished at how well calibrated I was (the irony is not lost on me); but the questions were all in A-vs-B format rather than free form. The A-vs-B format is much easier to appear to be well calibrated.

In response to Uncertainty
Comment author: isionous 22 February 2013 01:30:16PM 0 points [-]

The wolfram alpha links in the article and previous comments seem to be broken in that the parentheses in the mathematical expression are missing, meaning that the links present readers with the wrong answer. It was rather confusing for me for a bit. You might want to update the links to something like this:

S pdf: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+3%2F2+*+%281+-+2*x+%2B+2*x^2%29+++from+0+to+1>
D pdf: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+6+*+%28x+-+x^2%29+++from+0+to+1>

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